


Catching Light With Your Hands

by Triss_Hawkeye



Category: Alice Isn't Dead (Podcast)
Genre: California, Gen, Meditation, Oracle - Freeform, Road Trip, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 02:59:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17133773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triss_Hawkeye/pseuds/Triss_Hawkeye
Summary: Sylvia goes looking for Oracles. Occasionally, she finds them.





	Catching Light With Your Hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [biprettydizzee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biprettydizzee/gifts).



Sylvia knows you can’t just go looking for them.

There are Oracles on these roads, but you can’t just find them when you want to. They find you. Sylvia looks anyway.

At every gas station she finds herself, she’ll take a walk around its perimeter, just stretching her legs and peering into the shadows for a grey hoodie. Nothing, of course, but she does eventually catch a whisper that one was seen not too long ago back in California. She’s in Nevada at the time, hitches a ride over the mountains and watches the yellow-coloured desert scrubland change to mountains and pine forest over the state boundary.

She takes some time at the rest stop at Donner Pass, wades out into the snow beyond the groups of families throwing snowballs and sledging until it’s just her and the summit pines and chest-deep snow. Carves out a space for herself and sits with her eyes closed until the cold seeps into her bones. She wouldn’t tell Keisha about something like this—she’d just tell her to look after herself—but the truth is, it helps her to focus. No, the opposite of focus. To drift, to reach that separated state just after waking where time is not a direction, it’s a space. She stays there until her own body’s warnings of danger overpower her trance, then she staggers back to the rest stop and hitches a ride down towards Sacramento. She doesn’t quite know for sure, just yet, but that mental state seems important, even now.

There’s a few different ways you can go south from there. Sylvia picks the 99. Like the Interstate, it’s mainly full of people driving from one end of the state to the other, but there’s just a little more there for those who want to stop a moment and see something interesting to break up their journey. Like the underground gardens in Fresno. You see what looks like a plot of land with some fruit trees scattered about, and it turns out to be a labyrinth of tunnels and underground rooms open to the sky where citrus trees poke their branches up towards the sun. It was the work of one man, for the most part—an Italian immigrant who decided to spend his lifetime digging tunnels and planting fruit trees in them. There are worse things to dedicate one’s life to, Sylvia supposes. She smuggles out an orange, and it tastes like meditation.

Further south, there’s another roadside attraction—a vintage cheese factory, with a gift shop and a seven-storey treehouse. The gift shop is filled with the sort of overpriced American trinkets Sylvia’s seen all over the country—mugs and fridge magnets bearing cheesy slogans, little twisted metal sculptures that don’t quite look the same every time she glances back at them, homemade chutneys and hot sauces that just for a moment make her long for the sort of life in which she’d have a cupboard where she could keep them, a stationary place called home where you eat just a bit of something and come back to it later. A pot of chutney manages to be such a sedentary thing. Almost immediately the idea makes her shiver and back away. 

She goes to the treehouse out the back. It’s just a dollar to get in—no one’s watching her, but she slides a note into the box anyway, an offering perhaps. She’s small and lanky enough that she fits inside easily, and scrambles her way to the top of the wooden edifice shaped like several sheds got stacked on top of each other, up narrow steps to the very top, where she just sits and listens to the creaking of the wood. Human hands made this thing, but it’s a primal sound against the dull roar of traffic on the highway nearby. There is no Oracle here either, but it feels like there might have been at one point. She sits and considers this, closing her eyes and trying to reach through time and grasp the moment that contained the thing she seeks. It’s like trying to catch light in her hand. It doesn’t work. But it feels like it almost did.

It’s all farmland here, all fields and orchards stretching out on either side of the road, far as the eye can see. The mountains are too far away to be seen through the haze from here. If you stayed here, it would be so easy to believe that they didn’t really exist at all. But Sylvia doesn’t stay—she feels like she’s forgotten what that means, to experience a life not transient and ever-shifting. She finds mountains again, further south on the way to Los Angeles. She can glance behind on the winding road upwards and see the valley stretch out into the distance, and wonder at how much space can be folded up so small as to fit into her eyes.

There’s a gas station at the foot of the climb with overinflated prices, where lines of people wait to fill up their tanks, not trusting that they can make the ascent on what they have left. Sylvia wanders into the store, picks up an energy drink in the corner out of view of the line at the counter, and that’s where she finally meets them. The Oracle. A thin figure in a grey hoodie, hunched over by the shelf of chips, looking like it’s taking all their effort to stand without collapsing. Sylvia freezes, as if afraid that any sudden movement might scare them off. She realises that she has so much inside her, so many questions, memories of her mother, but none of that comes out in words right now. She waits, and watches the Oracle as they face her, skipping the action of turning altogether, their face shadowed in the depths of their pulled-up hood.

“It’s hard to know what you need,” they say, their voice soft and distant. “You are so spread out in time and space. Which you are you?”

Sylvia doesn’t know how to answer that. “I… have so many questions,” she says lamely, wondering why she suddenly can’t put any of them into words. The Oracle cocks their head, though, as if they understand completely.

“I can offer you encouragement,” they say, finally. “You will understand everything soon. You are heading in the right direction.”

“I’m not heading anywhere,” Sylvia replies. “I’m drifting.”

“Drifting always takes you somewhere,” the Oracle responds, and shifts to lean against the shelf. “Sorry,” they mutter. “Moments are hard.”

Sylvia just nods. “Thank you,” she says. She goes to join the line for her energy drink—not because she’s been dismissed, but because something inside her already knew that the conversation was over. She doesn’t quite understand it yet, but she does know that she will understand in the future. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she feels that she will see Keisha and Alice again very soon. And that’s when everything will become clear. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she thinks on it every morning when she wakes up and hangs on just a little longer to time spread out before her like a valley.

**Author's Note:**

> I think this might be the first Sylvia fic? Well, it's an honour to write it, she deserves it. Happy Yuletide, hope you enjoyed the journey!


End file.
